Sierra Club Tries to Stop Natural Gas Industry

The Sierra Club’s campaign against natural gas confirms that today’s green agenda is about banning all fossil fuels at all costs, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The environmental lobby, funded by liberal foundations, aims to stop the advance of the booming natural gas industry across the country, according to its executive director Michael Brune, who told the National Journal, “We’re going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can.”

And the Sierra Club has rolled out a new website to back the threat, that says, “The natural gas industry is dirty, dangerous, and running amok,” adding that “the closer we look at natural gas, the dirtier it appears; and the less of it we burn, the better off we will be.”

The reason behind the Sierra Club’s major campaign to kill the natural gas industry is fear of competition with its preferred “green” sources of energy — wind, solar, and biofuel. “Now that the hydraulic fracturing and shale revolution has sent gas prices down to $2.50, the lobby fears natural gas will come to dominate U.S. energy production. At that price, the Sierra Club’s Valhalla of wind, solar, and biofuel power may never be competitive. So the green left has decided it must do everything it can to reduce the supply of gas and keep its price as high as possible,” the Journal wrote.

That position is quite the deviation from its very recent history. From 2007 to 2010, the Journal noted, citing a Washington Post analysis, the group raked in $26 million in donations from Chesapeake Energy and others in the gas industry.

If the Sierra Club achieves its goal of shutting down the industry, it will come at a cost of 600,000 jobs that have been created in the natural gas industry and the “thousands of high-paying jobs in chemicals, fertilizer, and other manufacturing that is returning to the U.S. because natural gas prices are so much lower,” according to the Journal.